Reinstalling XP: Repair install cant see previous XP but recovery console can - advise please...

[Ian R]

Hi

My brother bought a new (larger/faster) HDD to replace his current Master on
primary IDE - so the idea was to clone the partitions from the old drive to
the new. Did that and then replaced the old HDD with the new i.e. as Master
on primary IDE channel.

(Note XP itself wasnt cloned as this is installed on the slave drive on the
primary IDE channel)

All seemed to go well then got the error message...

"missing or corrupted hal.dll"

Hmm how could that happen we didnt touch the slave drive?

Just for the hell of it we put back the original HDD back as master and we
got the same error!

Again why would that happen as nothing changed on the original drive or the
slave?

After reading up on various articles via Google we attempted to extract
hal.dl_ from the CD to the system32 folder via recovery console - but it
didnt work.

So decided to do a repair install.

But the hurdle we came across next was that the the repair option (not to be
confused with recovery console) couldnt see the original installation!!

Does anyone know why the recovery console can see J:\WINDOWS but the repair
install cant???

Very frustrating.

What should have been a fairly straighforward task is now causing a big
headache.

Thanks for any info and advice.

Ian

 

[R. McCarty]

What software tool did you use to "Clone" the partitions ? Your issue
could be Active partition assignment or problems with Boot.Ini.

 

[Ian R]

What software tool did you use to "Clone" the partitions ? Your issue
could be Active partition assignment or problems with Boot.Ini.

Hi

Thanks for replying.

Yes good points.

I used Powerquest Partition Magic 8 - which has worked fine for me any other
time I've cloned old to new.

Before replacing the old drive with the new, I made sure that the new drive
was set as the active partition. To confirm this it does actually boot up
from there and then presents with a short menu of which OS to load (its a
dual boot win98/xp and ironically the win98, which hasnt been used since xp
was installed, runs just fine!)

I also checked that boot.ini was looking for the windows installation on the
correct drive and partition.

Do you think that a Windows repair install is really that dependant on what
boot.ini says? If it is, it makes a nonsense of having a repair facility if
it cant see a multigigabyte folder containing windows system files and looks
to a tiny .ini file instead!!

Cheers.

Ian